Laurie Essig

Can exploding chocolate mean the revolution is here?

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A Texas woman in her 60s recently received a box of chocolates and a thank you note.  When she opened the box, it exploded with a spray of nails and tacks and the woman was forced to undergo emergency surgery.  And why did this happen?  It's difficult to say, but the woman is married to an oil executive and there is a lot of speculation that this is in response to the BP disaster.  A disaster for which there is more and more evidence was the result of greed and arrogance on the part of company executives. Indeed, Henry Waxman and Bart Stupak, both on the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, recently wrote

In effect, it appears that BP repeatedly chose risky procedures in order to reduce costs and save time and made minimal efforts to contain the added risk."

But what if the cost of those cost-cutting measures that led to a variety of environmental disasters for BP isn't just the fines and lawsuits that follow?  What if the real cost is that individual executives and their families are now specifically targeted by radical environmental activists?  What if these environmental activists, like other revolutionary groups before them, are trying to stop the system of greed and destruction that is the oil industry by scaring the tar balls out of the individuals in charge? It's not that far fetched a political strategy.  It's been around at least since the Decembrists (no, not the Indie rock group- the Russian upstarts of the 1800s). Yet bombing the indivduals responsible is still the tactic of revolutionary groups.   States and state-like entities, like the US or Al Qaeda, prefer to bomb innocent civilian populations.  And although this is a tactic of power, it is really not a great way to get people on your side.  But when the powerless start taking out the individuals (and perhaps their families) who directly profit from the greed that is the oil industry, something revolutionary is afoot. Bombing oil executives is an immediate way to get people to notice that things like the BP oil spill didn't just happen by accident or as the result of some human-less system.  The oil spill happened  because individuals in charge made decisions that put all of us at risk so that they could increase profit.  Instead, we are given a story that BP and the oil industry are these big machines that are unstoppable in their destruction of the environment.  But in fact, actual humans made the decisions that creates such horror.   The Gulf wasn't destroyed without individuals choosing to increase their wealth and the company's profit. I have to admit that whoever did this may have made a mistake by targeting the wife of the oil exec and not the exec himself, but perhaps they were trying to send a message not to the American people, but to the oil industry itself.  In other words, if this sort of greed is how you operate, you or your family might be at risk.  And that's a message that so far has not been heard. Sure- I know we're all guilty by association.  I drive a car.  I heat my home.  I have more electronics than could possibly be ethical.  But my complicity is not at the same level as an oil executive and neither is yours.  At least I hope complicity is different than guilt in the eyes of environmental revolutionaries.  Otherwise, the next exploding box of chocolates could be for us.

Not buying Earth Day

Remember the joke that "Army Intelligence" is an oxymoron like "jumbo shrimp" How about the oxymoron that is "environmentally friendly attack aircraft"?  That's what the Navy is planning for this Earth Day when it will

test-fly its main attack aircraft, the F/A-18 Super Hornet, on a biofuel blend this Earth Day, part of an ambitious push by the Pentagon to increase U.S. security by using less fossil fuel.

According to a report at McClatchy, the Department of Defense is way ahead of the civilian population when it comes to being earth friendly.

The Army plans to have 4,000 electric vehicles in the next three years, one of the biggest electric fleets in the world. The Air Force plans to provide 25 percent of the energy at its bases with renewable energy by 2025 and use biofuels blends for half its aviation fuel by 2016. The Navy plans to launch a strike group by 2016 that runs entirely on non-fossil-fuel energy, including nuclear ships, combat ships that run on hybrid electric power systems using biofuels, and aircraft that fly only on biofuels."

If a greened up military isn't enough to inspire you to save the planet, how about Hollywood?  Timing the release of "Avatar"on DVD and Blu-ray to coincide with Earth Day could, according to the filmmakers, save the world.

The Earth Day release of Avatar on DVD and Blu-ray is no accident. Instead, it is a deliberate political and social act. By taking audiences back to Pandora, James Cameron wants to make a difference in the environmental movement, a primary inspiration for the movie in the first place. 'I don’t think I’m coming out of the closet,' the 55-year-old Cameron says in an interview about aligning Avatar with the Earth Day Network. 'I think I was pretty up front about it. I think the themes in the movie are pretty damned overt.”

Okay, if you are so cynical that neither the US military nor the biggest blockbuster movie EVER  inspire you to go green, how about Wal-Mart's Earth Day campaign.  "Thinking about the future... with unbeatable prices" is Wal-Mart's  slogan and their policy is "let's make ethical environmental choices as difficult as possible for our customers."  That's why you can buy environmentally friendly cleaning products from Clorox, makers of dioxin-laden bleach!  Or those lovely lightbulbs that last forever but contain mercury so when they're not properly disposed of, leak into the already-contaminated water supply.  Or how about tees of organic cotton= made by whom? And under what conditions?  At $7 a tee, I'm guessing the tees were probably not made by adults receiving a livable wage. Over at Psychology Today, there is some interesting research showing what these examples of stupid Earth Day stunts tell us.  That we "go green" and celebrate Earth Day for status with our peers, not because we're actually willing to sacrifice anything to save the environment.  In other words, we "go green to be seen." In the case of the military, they wish to be seen as "not dependent on foreign oil" as well as earth-friendly sorts whom we can trust.  In the case of "Avatar," the filmakers wish to be seen as selling us a movie worth buying - more plastic, more energy, more of a carbon footprint, but hey, more profit too.  As for Walmart, a company famous for putting local businesses out of business and increasing the cost of transport while simultaneously decreasing the cost of labor so we can all buy more stuff we don't need and increase our individual carbon footprints, well, they want to be seen as an eco-friendly company, one that is not out to destroy planet earth and your local community. [daylifegallery id="1271947686044"] But we can't just talk trash about big military, big entertainment, and big corporations.  We have to talk a bit of trash about ourselves.  No matter how many trees we plant  on Earth Day, when it comes to actually inconveniencing ourselves, even just a little, we tend to trash our eco-politics just as quickly as we're trashing planet Earth. Perhaps "going green to be seen" is not a bad thing per se.  If we award higher status to those who act in environmentally friendly ways, that's better than awarding status to those with a huge McMansion and driving in a Hummer. But perhaps status needs to be transformed from "consuming stuff for Earth Day" to measuring ourselves and each other on what we don't consume. I am going to start with myself and not buy anything for Earth Day.  Not an eco-friendly military, a movie with a message, not even an organic cotton shirt.  In fact, this year,  I'm not even going to buy Earth Day.

What if American politics are getting dumberer?

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I know I've been out of the country for quite some time, but I have this sinking feeling that the collective IQ of American politicians has dropped precipitously this year.  Maybe I just wasn't paying attention to how bad things are.  It's difficult when you live outside the country to really get a sense of what's going on.  But somehow I was shocked to find out that our politicians are still debating whether global warming is real. I thought we'd settled that one.  Sure there were the greedy politicians who covered up for big polluters by saying

Let's not worry about global warming now.  We'll find technological solutions later on.  Besides global warming might mean we can grow citrus in North Dakota."

But were there large numbers of politicians two or three years ago who were so loudly denying the fact that the earth's climate has been getting warmer? Now I read that the recent snows in the US are giving the "other side" of the global warming debate ammunition.  Not the other side as in "greed is good, let's not regulate industry" but the other side as in "there's a big snow storm so I guess there's no such thing as global warming." According to a piece in the NY Times,

Skeptics of global warming are using the record-setting snows to mock those who warn of dangerous human-driven climate change — this looks more like global cooling, they taunt.... As an illustration of their point of view, the family of Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, a leading climate skeptic in Congress, built a six-foot-tall igloo on Capitol Hill and put a cardboard sign on top that read “Al Gore’s New Home.”

In  Virginia, a state where the Republicans tend to be even dumberer than elsewhere,

As the first blizzard howled last weekend, the Virginia Republican Party put up an advertisement on the Web — titled “12 Inches of Global Warming” — criticizing two Virginia Democrats, Representatives Rick Boucher and Tom Perriello, who voted for the federal cap-and-trade legislation last year. The advertisement urges voters to call Mr. Boucher and Mr. Perriello to ask if they will help with the shoveling.

Excuse me if I sound like my 14 year old, but WTF? 85% of Americans think that global warming is "probably happening" and 88% think it threatens future generations.  And politicians are now in serious debate on the same "two sides" they were decades ago. Which part of  climate  vs. weather is lost on these people. Weather: a daily event.  Climate: long term trend.  American politics: dumber and dumberer.

Santa Obama, why are you giving us a lump of coal this year?

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Last week I was asked by a radio show host whether the "Left" was digging it's own grave by being so critical of the Obama administration and the Dems in charge of Congress.  Today we have news that we don't need to dig our own grave, because Obama has done it again.  Promised us change, made pretty speeches, then actually reinforced the current status quo better than a Republican could ever do. In other words, Santa Obama has delivered a big fat piece of coal to us for the Holidays.  Wrapped up nicely in Copenhagen, Obama will tell us the coal is a huge gift, a big agreement that will save us from global warming, but it's a lie.  Just like the health care bill will make things worse, just as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq will bankrupt us and destroy any hopes of America being a "force of good" in the world, the agreement from Copenhagen will sink us, literally, under the melting polar ice caps. Here's what Bill McKibbon had to say about it.

(Obama) blew up the United Nations... The clear point is, you poor nations can spout off all you want ... But when you get too close to the center of things that count--the fossil fuel that's at the center of our economy--you can forget about it. We're not interested. You're a bother, and when you sink beneath the waves we don't want to hear much about it. The dearest hope of the American right for fifty years was essentially realized because in the end coal is at the center of America's economy...(Obama) formed a league of super-polluters, and would-be super-polluters. China, the U.S., and India don't want anyone controlling their use of coal in any meaningful way. It is a coalition of foxes who will together govern the henhouse. It is no accident that the targets are weak to nonexistent. We don't want to get too far ahead of ourselves with targets, he said. Indeed. And now imagine what this agreement will look like with the next Republican president. ... George Bush couldn't have done this--the reaction would have been too great. Obama has taken the mandate that progressives worked their hearts out to give him, and used it to gut the ideas that progressives have held most dear. The ice caps won't be the only things we lose with this deal.

Copenhagen Talks End With Agreement, But No Binding Deal: So, How Screwed Are We? | Environment | AlterNet. And here's what Greenpeace had to say about the Copenhagen agreement.

Don't believe the hype, there is nothing fair, ambitious or legally binding about this deal.  The job of world leaders is not done. Today they shamefully failed to save us all from the effects of catastrophic climate change."

Santa Obama, baby?  Maybe you didn't get our list?  Maybe you thought we said "We want things to stay exactly the same and therefore continue to get worse" when what we actually wrote on our list was "CHANGE"? I know that your little helpers in Congress are really no help at all, and I know we should have stopped believing in Holiday Magic a long time ago, but Santa Obama, a lump of coal wrapped up and labeled "stop global warming"? Santa Obama, next year can you just give me some diamond jewelry instead?

The Yes Men 1: Business as Usual 0

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The Yes Men are a brilliant collection of activists who are trying to change the world, one absurd stunt at a time.  The Chamber of Commerce is a collection of "business as usual" sorts who are actively working against legislation to stop climate change. Yesterday, the Yes Men punked the Chamber of Commerce and punked 'em good. On Tuesday morning a press release went out saying the Chamber of Commerce had miraculously reversed its stand on climate legislation.  Instead of spending millions of dollars lobbying Washington to "do nothing" the business world had suddenly come to its senses and seen that something must be done. News outlets, including a Reuters story that was reprinted in the NY Times, reported the Chamber's "reversal" on climate change legislation. Then yesterday afternoon they held a press conference.

The group of reporters at the Press Club listened closely as U.S. Chamber "representative" "Hingo Sembra" (Andy Bichlbaum of The Yes Men) asserted that the Chamber would put its full weight behind supporting the Kerry-Boxer bill, while working with Senators Kerry and Boxer to strengthen the bill. "We believe that climate legislation currently being considered by the U.S. Senate is a great start towards a bill that will spur American innovation, create jobs, and give us all a good chance of survival," he said. To the visible delight of reporters in the audience, he added, "We at the Chamber have tried to keep climate science from interfering with business. But without a stable climate, there will be no business."

Then things got really absurd when Eric Wohlschlegel - of the real Chamber of Commerce - confronted the faux Chamber of Commerce Sembra.  For some reason Wohlschlegel kept demanding a business card and then announced to the reporters that "he doesn't even have a business card" as if having one would have made this less of a hoax. U.S. Chamber of Commerce | The Yes Men. Perhaps some reading or watching the stunts of the Yes Men and other activist groups that rely on pointing out the absurdity of corporate greed will wonder: Why bother? Because the Yes Men understand that symbolic acts can have huge consequences. Vaclav Havel's 1978 essay, "The Power of the Powerless," inspired a generation in the former Czechleslovakia.  And what was it about? A completely symbolic and somewhat absurd act of taking a Communist slogan, "Workers of the World Unite," from the front of the grocery store and throwing it in the backroom. State communism was so out of touch with the needs of the people, its slogans so meaningless, that the very simple act of no longer participating had a huge effect, in the essay and in the real world. The Yes Men, like Havel's grocery store owner, are symbolically undermining the slogans of neoliberal capitalism: greed is good, profit over people, consequences are not our problem. By undermining the symbolic order, the Yes Men force us all to think.  Once you think about it, a system as out of touch with the needs of the people and a world on the brink of climate collapse is absurd. The sort of capitalism running our world is as absurd as (and perhaps more dangerous than) the sort of communism that was running Havel's.  Why are we continuing to pretend as if we can still do "business as usual" when it is leading us to our doom?  Let's symbolically throw these slogans into the backroom and just refuse to participate any longer. What both Havel and the Yes Men understood is that the power of the powerless is the power to change the world.  One absurd act at a time.

Wars, record number of hungry, more bonuses for AIG. A map of the world.

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In our world, it is difficult to construct a unilinear narrative.  There are so many competing stories and images to grab our attention that anything like "meaning" is quickly lost.  This is particularly true in the "news" industry where there is almost never any larger story about why people are killing other people in Afghanistan, in high schools, in their own homes, why there's no world reaction to melting ice caps, record salaries and bonuses on Wall Street, starving children. Sometimes I like to play a game called stream-of-consciousness mapping.   I pick two or three stories and ask "How are these related?"  It makes the news both more interesting, but also more meaningful. Two stories in today's paper are a case in point: a record 1 billion plus human beings are hungry and General McCrystal will request 60,000 more troops in Afghanistan. CBC News - World - Undernourished surpass 1 billion: UN. So let's see.  According to a UN report,

The ranks of the world's hungry has surpassed one billion, and declining aid and investment in agriculture are expected to steadily increase the number of undernourished people for more than a decade.

And the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which according to costofwar.com is already over $920,000,000,000, might go ahead and get bigger and costlier.  I am not, you'll notice, even mentioning the human costs (since today's game only involves two stories). Certain among you will say "America's safety is on the line" but isn't our safety undermined by people who are hungry and desperate?  Isn't one of the major reasons people join the Taliban or al Qaeda or any other militant group because they're desperate and it seems like a such a group will allow a more secure future (even if that future is in the afterlife)? This stream-of consciousness question asking is part of the game.  Right now these questions pop into my mind: And why isn't a record number of hungry people  an issue of national security? And why isn't  the cost of war a threat to our national security? And as unethical as the Taliban might be or Al Qaeda, how unethical is it to spend money on war instead of investment in agriculture so people can eat? Oh, but wait, here's another story to add to the stream-of consciousness mapping: the Feds are trying to stop AIG from paying out another $198 million in bonuses to the very employees who helped create the global economic meltdown that helped inflate food and fuel prices, forcing desperately poor people to sell their meager belongings and be even less able to farm AND lessened agricultural aid given by wealthier nations. Why are AIG employees not making the connections that are so obvious between their greed and a record number of people hungry in the world? When I explained this game to a colleague who writes about the mentally ill, he told me it wasn't stream-of-consciousness mapping, but schizophrenic.  Apparently, as a mental illness, schizophrenia tends to create connections where none are there. Perhaps he's right.  Perhaps these lines can't be drawn. Perhaps there is no relationship between AIG, the wars, and a record number of hungry people. Or perhaps only by drawing them ourselves and not relying on the news industry, which "for some reason" (what is it, I wonder, and is it related to profit or a national culture of attention deficit disorder?) can we construct a map of the world and a more sane way of getting from here to there.

Wars, record number of hungry, more bonuses for AIG. A map of the world.

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="240" caption="Image by Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the BPL via Flickr"][/caption]

In our world, it is difficult to construct a unilinear narrative.  There are so many competing stories and images to grab our attention that anything like "meaning" is quickly lost.  This is particularly true in the "news" industry where there is almost never any larger story about why people are killing other people in Afghanistan, in high schools, in their own homes, why there's no world reaction to melting ice caps, record salaries and bonuses on Wall Street, starving children. Sometimes I like to play a game called stream-of-consciousness mapping.   I pick two or three stories and ask "How are these related?"  It makes the news both more interesting, but also more meaningful. Two stories in today's paper are a case in point: a record 1 billion plus human beings are hungry and General McCrystal will request 60,000 more troops in Afghanistan. CBC News - World - Undernourished surpass 1 billion: UN. So let's see.  According to a UN report,

The ranks of the world's hungry has surpassed one billion, and declining aid and investment in agriculture are expected to steadily increase the number of undernourished people for more than a decade.

And the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which according to costofwar.com is already over $920,000,000,000, might go ahead and get bigger and costlier.  I am not, you'll notice, even mentioning the human costs (since today's game only involves two stories). Certain among you will say "America's safety is on the line" but isn't our safety undermined by people who are hungry and desperate?  Isn't one of the major reasons people join the Taliban or al Qaeda or any other militant group because they're desperate and it seems like a such a group will allow a more secure future (even if that future is in the afterlife)? This stream-of consciousness question asking is part of the game.  Right now these questions pop into my mind: And why isn't a record number of hungry people  an issue of national security? And why isn't  the cost of war a threat to our national security? And as unethical as the Taliban might be or Al Qaeda, how unethical is it to spend money on war instead of investment in agriculture so people can eat? Oh, but wait, here's another story to add to the stream-of consciousness mapping: the Feds are trying to stop AIG from paying out another $198 million in bonuses to the very employees who helped create the global economic meltdown that helped inflate food and fuel prices, forcing desperately poor people to sell their meager belongings and be even less able to farm AND lessened agricultural aid given by wealthier nations. Why are AIG employees not making the connections that are so obvious between their greed and a record number of people hungry in the world? When I explained this game to a colleague who writes about the mentally ill, he told me it wasn't stream-of-consciousness mapping, but schizophrenic.  Apparently, as a mental illness, schizophrenia tends to create connections where none are there. Perhaps he's right.  Perhaps these lines can't be drawn. Perhaps there is no relationship between AIG, the wars, and a record number of hungry people. Or perhaps only by drawing them ourselves and not relying on the news industry, which "for some reason" (what is it, I wonder, and is it related to profit or a national culture of attention deficit disorder?) can we construct a map of the world and a more sane way of getting from here to there.

Is the GOP really a village of idiots?

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An appearance September 16th on the Rachel Maddow show by Frank Schaeffer (a former Evangelical Christian leader and now anti-fundamentalist Christian activist) explains the insanity of our current political climate in the following way: 1.  Fundamentalist Christians are raised outside of rational thought to believe things like dinosaurs and humans cavorted on earth together... until God invented the rifle to kill the dinosaur... and the homosexual. 2.  Armageddon is a good thing since the fundamentalist Christians will go to Heaven (and the rest of us will be, as their literary genre suggests, "Left Behind") 3. The anti-Christ will appear, get a wound (bullet hole?) in his head and then appear in his true form and the fun of end times can finnally begin. Rachel Maddow: Why Do 1/3 of New Jersey Conservatives Think Obama Might Be the Anti-Christ? | Politics | AlterNet. I want to believe these things.  If we're really just dealing with a bunch of nutcases, then all we need to do is convince reasonable GOP leaders to stop mobilizing these people to win elections.  A big task, I admit, but still, GOP leaders are motivated by "reasonable" things, like power and money, right?  And ultimately, if big money in the form of corporate interests dries up for those GOP leaders who whip up the village idiots, then they'd stop. Unfortunately, it's too easy a story.  These crazy fundamentalist Christians with their fatwas on Obama and their belief in every paranoid parable from "Obama not born in US" to "Government Death Panels as part of Healthcare" are, quite honestly, not that stupid. Case in point: Dinner with Sarah Palin The charity "Ride to Recovery," which helps wounded US vets recover with cycling programs , auctioned off dinner with Sarah Palin over the weekend.  Ken Morris, rich guy turned thriller writer and Joe McGuiness, a vocal critic of Palin, pushed the bids past $60,000 when they were  mysteriously cut off because

Governor Palin reserves the right to refuse dinner with a winning bidder if, in her sole discretion, the winning bidder is not a suitable bidder based on her subjective standards of suitability, professionalism, background and other factors. In the event the high bidder is rejected for this reason, the high bidder's bid will be refunded, if paid, and the next highest bidder shall be notified, and thereafter, until a suitable match is determined.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/akmuckraker/palin-foe-frozen-out-of-a_b_292221.html

But no worries since one of those GOP idiots kept the bidding up and won the dinner with the former governor. According to AKMukraker's article in the Huffington Post,  Cathy Maples, the owner of a defense contracting company in Alabama, won the bid at $63,500.  Ms. Maples's told the AP that she's such a big fan of Sarah Palin's that she's traveled to Alaska twice before to meet her.  Since the reason that Ms. Maples likes Sarah Palin so much is because "she's got a lot of morals,"  I have to assume Maple's one of those fundamentalist "idiots" who comprise the GOP and the Evangelical Christian movement. Okay, call me an idiot, but the owner of a defense contracting company managed to whip up patriotic spirit for the militaristic likes of Sarah Palin, who will, no doubt, run for President and the press covered it start to finish?  And Ms. Maples has an extra $65K sitting around and she's an idiot? The problem with pretending that Evangelical Chrisitans are just a marginalized group of idiots, with no power and no money, is that it's just not true.  Fundamentalist Christians who really do believe that God hates everyone who is different from them are  roaming this country with huge amounts of money and power.  They are like T-Rex: stupid, perhaps, but big, mean, and really powerful.  The GOP cannot ignore them anymore than humans could have ignored T-Rex, if in fact we had inhabited the planet at the same time, which we didn't. Which leads us to the real idiocy: the idea that politics can be run by money and not be a congress of idiots.  Without real reform of how politicians get funded (by "idiots" like Cathy Maples with money made from our tax dollars being spent on her defense contracting company rather than "smart" people like us who don't have an extra $60,000 to influence people), this country will continue to descend into the true idiocy of christian fundamentalism married to corporate interests represented by the likes of Palin. The real truth is, we have on our hands a theocracy of fascism that is so heavily armed and moneyed that we might as well burn the village down and start over.

Is the GOP really a village of idiots?

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Image via Wikipedia"][/caption]

An appearance September 16th on the Rachel Maddow show by Frank Schaeffer (a former Evangelical Christian leader and now anti-fundamentalist Christian activist) explains the insanity of our current political climate in the following way: 1.  Fundamentalist Christians are raised outside of rational thought to believe things like dinosaurs and humans cavorted on earth together... until God invented the rifle to kill the dinosaur... and the homosexual. 2.  Armageddon is a good thing since the fundamentalist Christians will go to Heaven (and the rest of us will be, as their literary genre suggests, "Left Behind") 3. The anti-Christ will appear, get a wound (bullet hole?) in his head and then appear in his true form and the fun of end times can finnally begin. Rachel Maddow: Why Do 1/3 of New Jersey Conservatives Think Obama Might Be the Anti-Christ? | Politics | AlterNet. I want to believe these things.  If we're really just dealing with a bunch of nutcases, then all we need to do is convince reasonable GOP leaders to stop mobilizing these people to win elections.  A big task, I admit, but still, GOP leaders are motivated by "reasonable" things, like power and money, right?  And ultimately, if big money in the form of corporate interests dries up for those GOP leaders who whip up the village idiots, then they'd stop. Unfortunately, it's too easy a story.  These crazy fundamentalist Christians with their fatwas on Obama and their belief in every paranoid parable from "Obama not born in US" to "Government Death Panels as part of Healthcare" are, quite honestly, not that stupid. Case in point: Dinner with Sarah Palin The charity "Ride to Recovery," which helps wounded US vets recover with cycling programs , auctioned off dinner with Sarah Palin over the weekend.  Ken Morris, rich guy turned thriller writer and Joe McGuiness, a vocal critic of Palin, pushed the bids past $60,000 when they were  mysteriously cut off because

Governor Palin reserves the right to refuse dinner with a winning bidder if, in her sole discretion, the winning bidder is not a suitable bidder based on her subjective standards of suitability, professionalism, background and other factors. In the event the high bidder is rejected for this reason, the high bidder's bid will be refunded, if paid, and the next highest bidder shall be notified, and thereafter, until a suitable match is determined.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/akmuckraker/palin-foe-frozen-out-of-a_b_292221.html

But no worries since one of those GOP idiots kept the bidding up and won the dinner with the former governor. According to AKMukraker's article in the Huffington Post,  Cathy Maples, the owner of a defense contracting company in Alabama, won the bid at $63,500.  Ms. Maples's told the AP that she's such a big fan of Sarah Palin's that she's traveled to Alaska twice before to meet her.  Since the reason that Ms. Maples likes Sarah Palin so much is because "she's got a lot of morals,"  I have to assume Maple's one of those fundamentalist "idiots" who comprise the GOP and the Evangelical Christian movement. Okay, call me an idiot, but the owner of a defense contracting company managed to whip up patriotic spirit for the militaristic likes of Sarah Palin, who will, no doubt, run for President and the press covered it start to finish?  And Ms. Maples has an extra $65K sitting around and she's an idiot? The problem with pretending that Evangelical Chrisitans are just a marginalized group of idiots, with no power and no money, is that it's just not true.  Fundamentalist Christians who really do believe that God hates everyone who is different from them are  roaming this country with huge amounts of money and power.  They are like T-Rex: stupid, perhaps, but big, mean, and really powerful.  The GOP cannot ignore them anymore than humans could have ignored T-Rex, if in fact we had inhabited the planet at the same time, which we didn't. Which leads us to the real idiocy: the idea that politics can be run by money and not be a congress of idiots.  Without real reform of how politicians get funded (by "idiots" like Cathy Maples with money made from our tax dollars being spent on her defense contracting company rather than "smart" people like us who don't have an extra $60,000 to influence people), this country will continue to descend into the true idiocy of christian fundamentalism married to corporate interests represented by the likes of Palin. The real truth is, we have on our hands a theocracy of fascism that is so heavily armed and moneyed that we might as well burn the village down and start over.

The white revolution will not be noticed

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Yesterday, tens, possibly hundreds, of thousands of angry white Americans gathered in Washington, DC to show their Obama-hating, Glen Beck loving, tea bagging, patriotic selves and no one noticed.  It's not that no one noticed the protesters, but no one seemed to notice that the crowd was 99.9% white. At least the New York Times didn't notice. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/us/politics/13protestweb.html?ref=todayspaper If a hundred thousand Black or Latino Americans gathered in DC to say things like "We hope the President is afraid, very afraid" then the Times and other papers of record would be talking about a Race Revolution. But whiteness, as usual, gets to pass by as an unmarked race, just good ol' Americans wearing silly Revolutionary War costumes and carrying (white successionist movement) yellow flags.

Consider this description of the protest:

On a cloudy and cool day, the demonstrators came from all corners of the country, waving American flags and handwritten signs explaining the root of their frustrations. Their anger stretched well beyond the health care legislation moving through Congress, with shouts of support for gun rights, lower taxes and a smaller government... Protesters came by bus, car and airplane, arriving here from Texas and Tennessee, New Mexico and New Hampshire, Ohio and Oregon... Ruth Lobbs, 57, a schoolteacher from Jacksonville, Fla., said she flew to Washington on Saturday to protest how she believes the government has violated the Constitution. She said she did not vote for the president, adding that her anger has been building for years. “It’s more than Obama — this isn’t a Republican or a Democratic issue,” Ms. Lobbs said as she held a yellow flag that declared, “Don’t Tread on Me.”

Sounds kinda cozy, right? Except that yellow flag with the Don't Tread on Me is the Gadsden flag, used by armed militia around the country.  And despite the sweet little ol' school teacher/white militia supporter's claim that this is not a Republican or Democratic issue, the white revolution is being funded and fueled by a fair number of Republican politicians. Of course there were

sharp words of profane and political criticism were aimed at Mr. Obama and Congress.

But

many demonstrators expressed their views without a hint of rage. They said the size of the crowd illustrated that their views were shared by a broader audience.

Perhaps the Times might have mentioned that the broader audience is "white"?  No, instead they quote Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) saying

This is not some kind of radical right-wing group. I just hope the Congress, the Senate and the president recognize that people are afraid of what’s going on.”

Hello, New York Times?  This is Senator Jim DeNutcase who early on called on Republicans to use  health care  debates to "break Obama" and is a well-known tenther (these are the folks who think the 10th Amendment allows states to ignore federal mandates- so things like the Civil Rights Act cannot in fact be enforced). What is it going to take for the mainstream media to start calling a spade a spade?  The GOP and a variety of corporate interests have whipped up a racial revolution that is going to tear this country apart.  The dissolution of the American Empire may be a good thing, but what's coming after it will be scary, especially if you're not white or don't have ten assault weapons in your truck. If the media doesn't do its job and recognize a white revolution when it gathers in large numbers on their doorstep, then they will have the blood of patriots on their hands.  Not the crazy white people running around screaming that Obama is Hitler, but the blood of real Americans who do not think that "guns and God" made this country great, but diversity and respect and a willingness to take care of one another when times are tough.  It is surely these Americans who will  suffer the consequences of the highly-armed wrath of the White Revolution.